A population on the move: migration and gender relations in Albania

Under the harshest communist regime in Europe, emigration from Albania was impossible, and internal migration was tightly controlled. After 1990, everything changed. Twenty years later, 1.4 million Albanians, equivalent to half of Albania’s resident population, live abroad; internal migration has also taken place on a massive scale. This paper describes these largescale migrations within the broader setting of ‘post-Wall’ European mobility and relates them to the changing context of gender relations in Albania.